Sunday, June 18, 2006

Another Reason I Don't Like Soccer

The US played Italy to 1-1 tie today, which raises the question why isn't there overtime in soccer? I've never gotten a soccer apoligist to give me a legitimate answer to this question. Football, Baseball, Basketball and hockey all use some sort of overtime. A tie is meaningless in my mind it's not any better than a loss. Hey soccer people you could make your sport far more exciting if you added a sudden death overtime to break ties.

It takes your beloved NFL 16 games to come up with as many scenarios for making the playoffs as you get in 3 games of round-robin-with-ties-world-cup-action. Just check out what it takes for the US to advance. (By the way, the NFL still has ties.)

They have "extra time" in the knock-out part of the tournament because there you have to have a winner to go through to the next round. In the first part of the tourney the teams are grouped in mini leagues and given 1 point for a draw and 3 for a win. The whole point of that is to have fun working out what combination of wins, draws, goal difference etc results in what placing in the group and therefore for the top two teams in each, which ends up playing which in the first game of the knock-out.

You guy's have no reason to change my stance. Sports is about wins and losses not ties. Yes Justin you are correct the NFL does have ties but a tie in NFL is about as rare as an Atlanta Braves win these days.